


measure the globe

by lightningwaltz



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Manga Spoilers, Non-Chronological, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 15:24:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/928088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the eve of a confrontation, Armin, Eren, and Mikasa consider what they know about Annie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	measure the globe

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, nthcoincident! I had trouble choosing between some of the pairings you requested. Namely I'm intrigued by each of the Annie related pairings, so I wound up writing about all of them! Specifically, I wanted to explore the main trio's interactions with her, and feelings about her etc. 
> 
> The manga's use of flashbacks sneaked into this fic, too. Technically it's set the night before Eren, Mikasa, and Armin set out to capture her, but the bulk of it is about hypothetical interactions they've had with her during training.
> 
> Thanks for such a great prompt! I had a really good time writing it, and thinking about how these four relate to one another.

_Armin's case against Annie is strong, unassailable. Mikasa seems to have accepted it the way she accepts all uncertainties. Eren, meanwhile, has been trying to chip away at the theory ever since Armin proposed it. He's still at it the night before their plan is to go into effect._

_"How can Annie be a titan shifter?" Eren says. "How is that possible?"_

_Armin draws in a breath to explain, but Mikasa cuts him off. "He doesn't mean that literally." She has cloudy eyes and a clenched jaw.. Armin remembers that this is how she looks before battle, before she goes in for the kill._

_"Yeah. **Yeah.** It doesn't make sense." Eren's almost pleading with them now, even though neither of them can change anything. "How could she fight and sleep beside us all and then... do what the female titan did?"_

Eren appears to have his two feet in two places at once. Here, in this furtive conference. And back there, on the battlefield, stuck remembering when the Survey Corp was devoured in front of him. Armin understands this; he's spent many hours considering that exact moment when the female titan pulled down his hood, and ran a finger over his head. He can still hear her booming strides as she ran away.

_"You can live with someone and not really know them," Armin says._

*

Annie’s ring catches the light as she walks by, its vividness carving a path straight into Armin’s concentration. 

_Haven’t you learned enough today?_ It’s been an afternoon for tactical and history classes, and most who catch him reading in the shade interrogate him thusly. Not Annie. One covert glance in his direction, and that’s it. She’s on her way. 

“Hello, Annie.” 

She stops in the unusual way she often does, without quite turning to face him, or moving much at all. In training sessions she’s much the same; Slow, languid, sullenly serene. Hard to believe that when she moves she is among the most lethal of their unit. She’s like a child’s windup toy. One which needs the right push, the right reservoir of energy, before she’s off and spinning into all in her path. 

“Armin.” Her head turns a fraction of an inch, and she's looking at him over her shoulder.

“What did you think of class today?” 

Armin wasn't sure how he felt about it, and what it meant for him. They had been ushered into a sparse room that smelled of cedar, and the instructor had gone over the titans’ verified traits. (Of which there were very few.) Armin had listened, picked at his cuticles, and tried to connect the instructor’s calm recitations with the horrors he had seen in Shiganshina. He had cowered in the titans’ shadow then, and had every reason to believe he would do so again when reunited with them.

Gravel and dirt crunch under Annie’s boots, as she maneuvers to better meet Armin’s scrutiny. “It was like all the other classes.” 

“Meaning?” Armin’s legs are folded, and he rests the open book on his thigh. 

“It was… far too wordy.” There’s something flinty and vibrant about her eyes. Armin wonders how many people see Annie’s inertia and stop there, treading no further. She makes him think about the rumored great bodies of water, and how they were said to be miles deep, and full of creatures with rows of sharp teeth. “All that was relevant is the information about their weak spot.” 

Unconsciously, Armin rubs the nape of his neck. “You’re probably right.” He laughs, in a haphazard cover for his insecurity. “But I’m reading all I can about them, anyway.”

Annie walks a few step further, into the shade. “Oh?” 

“It’s speculation, more than anything else. Written about fifty years ago.” 

“Maybe.” Armin flips through a few pages. Few have bothered reading this book, and the unused paper crackles a bit as its moved. The ink has faded over the decades to a brownish-red hue. A bit like blood, actually. “But it's useful when it comes to learning about what people thought and did before the walls. Before the titans, too.” 

Annie plucks grass out of the ground then rips it apart, leaving green smudges across her knuckles. “Find out anything interesting?” 

Armin pauses before responding. _Find out anything interesting?_ There's a great deal he finds interesting about their tattered and dying world, but talking about it at length has often earned him derisive laughter or punches. Only Eren and Mikasa have indulged him from the start. 

“At the moment I'm reading about a religion that was popular before…. Before everything. They believed that millennia ago, God sent a flood to kill most of humanity for allowing giants to live.” The same religion informed the wall cults now, but mostly in style rather than substance.

“And these giants were called… titans?” Annie tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, and somehow the gesture makes her look younger than her usual persona. 

“No these were called nephilim. There was another type of mythological giant, however, and they were called the titans.”

“What did they do?” 

Armin closes his eyes, seeing flashing sunspots when he does so. _The mythological titans..._ They weren’t mentioned in his current book. He had heard about them years ago, in stories his parents had told him before bedtime. “Those titans don't sound much like our titans. But they're similar in some important ways because... Their king caused their doom by eating their own young. He wanted to keep his children from rebelling.” Even now Armin can remember shivering in his childhood bed, fearful and eager all once for every gory detail.

Sometimes Annie is so still it looks like she's not breathing. "What happened to this king?"

The thought almost makes Armin smile. "One of his children escaped, lead a rebellion, and freed all his swallowed siblings. They started a new dynasty." 

"Such a convenient ending. I bet everyone lived happily ever after." Annie looks off to the side. In anyone else, Armin would read the gesture as one of waning interest. But with her... it seems to signify something else. Some deeper emotion he can't quite decipher. He can't help but push this subject, in the same way he'd worry at his baby teeth when they were falling out.

"Not exactly," Armin says, frowning. "The new dynasty fought amongst themselves, too. They hurt their children, and tried to grab power, and were easily tricked. In the end nothing much changed." And even though they eventually took their places as absolute rulers, the Olympians had once been children regurgitated from the endless stomach of their father. That thoroughly unglamorous moment, he thinks, had been their true moment of triumph. Because then, at least, they could make their own choices.

"What a cheerful lesson." 

"Yes, well... Better to make mistakes in freedom, where you have the option of being useful to others. Better that than being enslaved."

"Isn't living for others a kind of slavery?"

Armin can only blink at her. 

"You don't need to look at me like that. And you definitely don't take my word as law." Annie stands up, casting her shadow over Armin. “Maybe you should teach classes instead. The people who actually care to learn would pay more attention.” 

She puts her hand on his head, so briefly, so feather-light, that Armin would later wonder he’d imagined in it. 

*

 _"Okay." Eren looks down at the scabs on the base of his thumb. "Maybe she is a titan. But maybe she's like me and maybe when she transforms she... forgets who she is." When he looks up he stares at Mikasa in a silent apology. She grits her teeth and shakes her head. **Don't even worry about it**. She seems to want to protect him from death and culpability alike._

_"I don't think so." Ever since Trost, Armin's become terribly calm._

_"How can you know?" Eren asks._

_"The female type showed too much intelligence. She planned things in advance. You weren't like that when you... lost control of yourself."_

_Eren looks down at his clenched fist. He tries to hold onto memories of the female titan's slaughter. Tries to remember the scent of pine needles mixed with the stink of human corpses. Tries to resuscitate his queasy fury from that day. Instead, all he feels himself crouching in that well, how his hand was covered with blood and bite marks, and how he failed to transform on command. He only remembers his biting loneliness whenever someone says he isn't human._

_"If she is a titan shifter, I have so much to ask her_." 

*

Whenever Annie knocks Eren flat on his back- and it happens a lot when they first start to spar- his consciousness always lurches and shifts. It’s as though she’s struck him so hard, she’s briefly forced the soul from his body. Each time he closes his eyes against the sun, thinks about how strong she is. It really is a fucking shame she’s bound and determined to lock herself up behind Wall Sina.

Each time, when he opens his eyes again, that bit of stubborn praise rests on his lips, ready to be spoken aloud.

Each time she narrows her eyes as if to suggest; _say it and I will walk away._

So he bites the inside of his cheek so hard that sometimes blood fills his mouth, and his world goes blurry again.

There’s that one particular day, where he manages to wheedle his way into several more bouts than she typically allows him. Curious onlookers have long since fled to go have dinner, and the world is purple-gray in the way it gets during the last gasps of sunlight.

“I’m starting to wonder if you’ve learned all I can teach you.” Annie's facing away from him, and something about her profile makes Eren thinks of a drawing in one of Armin’s books. Some historical general. Except, Armin's historical and geographical lessons have a way of seeping into his psyche, even if he thinks half of it must be made of exaggerations. He still remembers it all. In comparison, Annie is a puzzle. The idea that Eren knows more about a long-dead woman than this fellow soldier in front of him… It's strange, really.

“What happened to your family?” When he speaks, the cicadas almost drown out his question.

She hears him anyway. Annie looks at him, and raises one eyebrow, and it's so out of place on her carefully composed face. Eren’s stomach turns at having inspired this much of a reaction. 

“Does it matter what happened to them? The past is unreachable.” She's icy, pragmatic, and far away from him despite being inches away.

“Of course you can't go back. That's not the point.” Eren wishes words were more adequate to the emotions boiling over within his body. There is no way to explain that he will always be a child running through Shiganshina’s sudden devestation. There's no way to explain that he will always hears his mother’s screams until he's eradicated every single titan. There's no way to explain that the past is locked and barred to him, but it's also a heavy gale at his back. 

There was no point to reaching for the past because it is always _there_.

But he's incapable of truly articulating these things, so instead he says; “You know everything about me. It seems unfair this way.” The dull words land like pebbles tossed into a lake. 

“How is that my fault?” Annie has the same posture they all do when they line up in rows before their training instructor. Arms to her side, back almost straight, shoulders hunched slightly. “You share everything willingly. No one is required to do the same.” She's so close he can see how the hair around her face has gone almost white from being out in the sun all day. Her nose is a little burned. In some ways, he’s had more physical contact with her than anyone else in his life. She’s punched him in the gut, gotten her arms around his waist, and straddled him in the dirt. Right now she could reach out and claw his eyes out, squeeze his windpipe or…

Even though the chill of the night night has closed in on them, Eren feels sweat sliding down the nape of his neck. “It’s just that… When I’m out in the scouting leagues and killing titans… I’m going to be fighting for everyone in the city. And that will include you, you know.” Since there was no way anyone could talk her out of the military police. “I’m going to be fighting for your life, too.” Eren's own arms are pressed into his sides. He thinks it's in an effort to avoid grabbing onto to her shoulders. To refrain from digging his fingers into her shirt to bodily convey the importance of all this. “I want to fight for everyone I know, and even the people I _don’t_ know.” 

“Okay. I see. You need to know everything about me so I serve better as motivation for your vengeance.” 

“That’s not-“ 

Annie holds a hand up a few inches from my face, before withdrawing it. “It is. That's what you're doing. And that’s not so bad, you know. People with conviction are interesting. I’ve been through enough in my life to know that your kind is rare.” 

Was that a compliment or a curse?

"Humanity's almost gone, Annie." There's a revealing catch in Eren's voice and he hates it. _Hates_ it. "Why shouldn't I care what happens to us?"

And Annie doesn't say anything, she just glances at his lips. Eren remembers a snatch of overheard conversation. Something about the signs that a woman wants to be kissed.

Uncertain he presses his mouth against hers, half expecting a punch to the ribs. She doesn’t. Eren closes his eyes and wonders what to do next, when she moves against him and he gets a feel for the rhythm. She's slow, and her skin is cool, but she doesn't seem disinterested They slide their lips together, tentative and unfamiliar but not unpleasantly so. She cups the side of his face with her hand, and the ring glides over his skin. The cicadas’ cries throb in the distance, and they sync with Eren’s frenzied heartbeat. After a certain point the two of them open their mouths and their tongues meet. That's even stranger, and even more gratifying. Eren can taste her teeth. He thinks, in a lightheaded sort of way, that it would be even easier for her to make him bleed right now.

When they break away, they don't really talk about it. Not there, not ever. Their kiss was sweet and unhurried, and therefore something that can't be repeated in their ferocious world.

"Why should you care about humanity?" Annie says instead, answering a question that seems like it's a lifetime away. "I'm the wrong person to ask."

*

_"You might not have time to ask her anything," Mikasa says. "The point is to verify her identity, and then we need to subdue her if she is the female titan."_

_"I know that!" For the briefest moment, Eren sounds like he's returned to his typical, combative self. Mikasa hears the echo of their childhood squabbles, and it eases something within her. For the past few weeks, she's been watching Eren's identity fracture and splinter. She's had to sit in an ornate courtroom, while government officials calmly debated executing and experimenting on the body of her only living family member. It's been agonizing._

_And Armin... Armin's also come close to dying in the past few battles. Sometimes Mikasa has nightmares about the day they thought Eren had died. She remembers Armin's bloodshot eyes and how he had carried himself like a corpse._

_Life had given her little reason to expend empathy on anyone beyond these two._

_"I'm just keeping us all from pointless speculation," she replies, after a long moment._

*

As a rule, Mikasa doesn’t change clothes until their barracks are nearly empty. On their second day of 3d maneuver gear training, she's especially eager to tear off her uniform and examine her wounds. She waits until nearly everyone trudges away to the mess hall. That leaves only Annie, reclining on a nearby bed. And when Annie decides to nap- or meditate, or whatever it is she does when she closes her eyes- one would have an easier time moving an anvil. 

In this silent, sun-soaked room, it’s deafening when Mikasa undoes the tie on her pants and lets them drop to the floor. She sits on the edge of her bed, judiciously scrutinizing every welt and bleeding cut. They crisscross the surface of her legs, reminding her of that one dusty spider web that's always in the corner by her bed. Her muscles are like stone or steel, and it has been ages since she’s felt the bone deep ache that comes with neglecting them. 

But the skin here… The skin is pale from being hidden by the sun. Unlike her calloused hands and feet, it has remained smooth and undisturbed from the years of toil. Beneath it lies nerves and pain sensors; many of which appear to be screaming at the introduction of 3d gear to her daily routine. Maybe, one day, the skin here would harden too. For now, though, her cuts are a vivid reminder of her humanity. They're a reminder of her _mortality._ And they're in direct contrast with the mythology that's begun to swirl around her.

Mikasa Ackerman; inevitable number one ranked students of the 104th.

Mikasa Ackerman; the most naturally skilled trainee the military has ever known.

Mikasa Ackerman; near immortal warrior born from Shiganshina's destruction.

The rumors continue to snowball. Their city sure love its stories about glorious soldiers, and everyone's chomping at the bit for a symbolic successor to Levi. As a result, Mikasa has never allowed her fellow trainees see her wince in pain or complain about falling in the mud. It's more of practical decision than anything borne of pride. She's bound to take on a leadership role, and she wants to present a persona worth following. This means she can't indulge her rare moments of frivolity, such as her giddy glee when the maneuver gear first tossed her into the sky. _(Do civilians know how freeing it can be?)_ And no one should see that she can be bruised and battered like any other novice. Only Eren knows when she was truly reborn as a warrior, and it was well before Shiganshina fell.

Any blood on Mikasa Ackerman must come from her enemies. 

She looks up, only to find Annie awake and staring at her legs. She has her head resting on her arm, and it’s almost like she’s unaware of staring. 

“Yes?” Mikasa asks, staying seated. Her hands clenched into her thin blankets. Annie is so indolent, that Mikasa almost wonders if she dreamed their competition from weeks before. Try as she might, she can barely remember that incident. The other recruits talk about it still, but when she tries to picture it, the scene morphs into a memory of seeing Eren and Annie's first duel. That sparks unpleasant emotions but Mikasa doesn't think it's anything like jealousy. She's felt this way only once before; the night she had to separate from Eren and Armin for a different set of barracks.

Such things tend to make her realize that the future is rushing in on her, and it comes armed.

“That gear is so impractical, don’t you think? It just makes getting in the top ten all the more difficult.” Annie says this without so much as a sneer or sigh. Mikasa tries to remember if she's ever seen her smile. She doesn't think so. 

_What would it mean if she **did**_ smile? 

For the briefest instant, Mikasa considers that there’s only a hairsbreadth difference between her and Annie. It makes her wonder what lies in the other woman's past, but that sends her thoughts spiraling into her own memories; her parents' corpses on the floor, the sight of blood on a dagger, and Eren shrieking at her to _live._

She shoves those things away as decisively as she would slam a door.

(Even so, a naive, hopeful part of her has latched onto the idea that Annie might have a similar story.)

“You're so calm.” Mikasa says. Annie has a child’s name, an adult’s weariness, and a body that never seems to be in pain. “Your father taught you a technique for fighting, did he teach you one for healing as well?”

This is the kind of thing that would make Mina Carolina giggle about cat fights and then run out of the room to escape the blast radius. But Mina’s off with Sasha and Christa, and the room is empty of all but the two of them. Annie doesn’t seem particularly offended. 

“There’s no quick way to get over pain, if that’s what you’re asking me.” Annie rolls onto her back, resting her head on her hands. Mikasa’s eyes roam her body; the swell of her breasts, and the way their pants cling to their legs. If someone were to pulled them off and expose the skin below, would she also be wounded? At the end of the day, does Annie run her hands over bruises and scratches too? If so, what does her reticence mean?

Maybe, in another world, Mikasa would have grown up without having to see her parents murdered in front of her. Maybe she in that world she would have grown up the type who asked frivolous questions, or kissed the people who intrigued her. 

But she's been denied that kind of life, and she's been denied that kind of levity. And privacy is the only luxury she can give to someone.

“It was worth a shot,” Mikasa murmurs, before pulling a box of bandages out from under her bed.

*

_Armin, Eren and Mikasa don't talk about it anymore that night._

_They know what they have to do tomorrow._


End file.
